Above class open to undergraduates and Education MA's only
Above class carries Culture Studies credit
Above class meets with GNDR-G302
This course examines dramatic historical transformations in British
sexual cultures and erotic lives – and historians differing
interpretations of them – from the early nineteenth century until
the “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960s and early 1970s, through a
series of controversial episodes or developments. Lectures,
discussions, and written work may address: the Queen Caroline Affair
(1820), the sexual and reproductive portraits of Britain created by
nineteenth century censuses, London “low life,” “Victorianism,”
state regulation of prostitution and its enemies, the birth control
trial of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant (1874), conflicts over
sexuality in British colonies, the 1888/9“Jack the Ripper” slayings,
the 1895 Oscar Wilde scandal, Marie Stopes’s sexological best-
sellers, "Married Love" (1918), the banning of D.H.
Lawrence’s, "Lady Chatterley’s Lover" (1928); early twentieth
century enquiries into Britain’s population, birthrate, abortion,
divorce, prostitution, & pornography, sexual mores and customs, the
advent of James Bond, the 1963 Profumo Affair, the Beatles
& “Beatlemania,” and the raft of liberalization measures of the
1960s affecting censorship, abortion, homosexuality, & divorce.
What were the political, economic, social, and cultural contexts for
the two centuries of these changes in British sexualities?